Helmuth Stoecker

Helmuth Stoecker (born November 22, 1920 in Berlin ; † September 5, 1994 ) was a German Marxist historian .

Life

Stoecker was the son of the communist politician and journalist Walter Stoecker , who died in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1939 . Helmuth Stoecker lived in exile in England from 1933 and studied history, philosophy and economics at the University of Bristol . In 1939 he was a co-founder of the FDJ in Great Britain. In 1940 he was interned as an " enemy alien ". In 1947 he returned to Germany and continued his studies in Leipzig, among others with Walter Markov , and in Berlin. From 1950 to 1952 he worked for the General German Intelligence Service and in 1952/53 as a research assistant at the Museum of German History .

From 1953 he worked at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In 1956 he did his doctorate on the colonial relations between Germany and China in the 19th century. A year later he was appointed lecturer at Humboldt University, where he was professor and head of the department for African studies from 1974 to 1983. In 1986 he retired.

Stoecker was considered one of the most prominent representatives of Marxist historiography about Africa. The archive holdings returned by the Soviet Union at the end of the 1950s were first processed in the GDR. The »colonial-critical colonialism research« began with Helmuth Stoecker and Walter Markov. Stoecker's anthology »Drang nach Afrika. The colonial expansion policy and rule of German imperialism in Africa from the beginning to the end of the Second World War «, the work of Peter Sebald on» Togo 1884–1914. A history of the German ›model colony‹ based on official sources ”(1988) and Horst Drechsler “ South West Africa under German colonial rule ”(1966). He was the first historian to call the colonial war in German South West Africa a genocide.

Fonts (selection)

• Germany and China in the 19th century. The penetration of German capitalism (= series of publications by the Institute for General History at the Humboldt University Berlin. Vol. 2, ISSN  2363-524X ). Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1958 (also extended phil. Dissertation, Humboldt University Berlin; in Chinese language and writing: Schrift 世紀 的 德国 与 中国. 生活 讀書 新知 三联 书店, 北京 1963).
• (Ed.): Cameroon under German colonial rule (= series of publications by the Institute for General History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Vol. 5 and 12). 2 vols. Rütten & Loening et al., Berlin 1960–1968.
• Walter Stoecker. The early days of a German labor leader. 1891-1920. Dietz, Berlin 1970.
• (Ed.): Urge to Africa. The colonial expansion policy and rule of German imperialism in Africa from the beginning to the end of the 2nd World War. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1977 (In Russian: История германского колониализма в Африке. Наука, Москва 1983; in English: German imperialism in Africa. From the beginnings until the Second World War. Hurst ua 1986, ISBN 1986 905838-95-5 ; 2nd, revised edition as: Drang nach Afrika. The German colonial expansion policy and rule in Africa from the beginnings to the loss of the colonies. Ibid 1991, ISBN 3-05-000825-3 ).
• Socialism with Deficits. An academic life in the German Democratic Republic (= adaptation, self-assertion, resistance. Vol. 14). Lit, Münster et al. 2000, ISBN 3-8258-3990-7 .

literature

• Alfred Fleischhacker (Ed.): That was our life. Memories and documents on the history of the Free German Youth in Great Britain 1939–1946. New life, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-355-01475-3 .